The Webster - A Deco Hotel Turned Fashion House

A stop on Miami Beach: Art Deco District Walk, a free self-guided tour.

Henry Hohauser designed this three-story building as the Webster Hotel in 1939, and you can still read its hotel past in the symmetrical facade and crisp Deco lines. Small Collins Avenue hotels like this one housed the winter visitors and middle-class vacationers who poured into South Beach in the years between the Depression and the war.

By the 2000s many of these little hotels needed new lives. In 2009 Laure Heriard Dubreuil, a Paris-born merchandiser who had worked for Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent, opened The Webster here as a multi-brand luxury fashion store. She kept the hotel's name and restored the building rather than gutting it, turning the old rooms into salons laid out like a stylish home, with vintage wallpapers and brass finishes. The store became the model for later Webster shops in other cities.

It is a neat example of how the district survives: the rules protect what you see from the street, while life inside keeps changing. Window-shopping is free.

Getting here: Follow Espanola Way east to Collins Avenue, turn right and walk south two blocks to 1220 Collins Avenue at 12th Street.

Did you know?: Henry Hohauser's firm is credited with more than 300 buildings in the Miami area, more than almost any other architect of the Deco era.

Photo op: Cross to the west side of Collins Avenue to fit the whole facade, from the sidewalk to the roofline, in one frame.

More on Wikipedia: Henry Hohauser · Collins Avenue

The Webster - A Deco Hotel Turned Fashion House

Stops on this tour